


Fighting Words

by Ghoststar



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Humor, Brief Ecco/Jeremiah, Bruce Wayne Does Not Leave, Bruce is 21/22, Crack, Daddy Kink, Dom/sub Undertones, Embarrassment, Hostage Situations, Jeremiah Does Not Become Extra Crispy, Jeremiah is about 27, M/M, Mild Kink, Post-Canon, Pre-Batman Bruce Wayne, Present Tense, Rating May Change, Second-Hand Embarrassment, Sexual Humor, This is in fact, Turns into Ecco/Ivy, Vigilante Bruce, Who needs Kink Shame when we can have reluctant Kink Same, this may or may not have smut in it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:21:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23106895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghoststar/pseuds/Ghoststar
Summary: The thing is, Bruce never actually had a plan for how he was going to use it. You can’t exactly kink shame someone into not attempting to become your mortal enemy. Honestly, the information should have been entirely useless to him, left to be swallowed up by every day concerns like Jeremiah’s latest plans for the city or the fact that he was on friendly terms with Oswald Cobblepot or really any number of things that wasn’t this. His brain should not be going, “hey, in case you forgot, Jeremiah Valeska has a daddy kink,” every couple of days like he has it set as his alarm clock. And yet, that's exactly what it does.-Five times Bruce uses Jeremiah's daddy kink against him and one time he doesn't.
Relationships: Jeremiah Valeska/Bruce Wayne
Comments: 29
Kudos: 127





	Fighting Words

**Author's Note:**

> Remember that scene where Ecco calls Jeremiah daddy? I blame that.

Bruce is a great many things. Resolute in his efforts to restore Gotham, meticulous in his investigations, efficient in his fights. He’s an incredible actor when he needs to be, moving from party boy billionaire to proper business man to innocent bystander at a moments notice. He wants to save Gotham, to help ease the suffering of its most vulnerable, and he’s willing to exhaust himself and his resources to accomplish that.

But on occasion Bruce can be naive. It’s a weakness that he’s done his best to eliminate over the years. He doesn’t trust easily anymore, plans for the worst case scenario, and when he encounters something new he researches it until he knows it inside and out. It doesn’t happen often, not after close to a decade of being exposed to Gotham’s criminal underbelly, but it does happen. A sheltered childhood, and then years of single-minded focus haven’t left a lot of room for learning the things most people encounter at some point during their early adulthood. Even his detour through wealth fueled debauchery hadn’t filled in all the blanks.

So the first- and last time- he hears Ecco call Jeremiah daddy he stares at her in utter bewilderment. He notes the way Jeremiah straightens at the pet-name, his eyes leaving Bruce for the first time that night to give her a moment of attention. He’s patient-almost indulgent- when he speaks to her, something Jeremiah often was with Bruce when they were building the generator-that-wasn’t. An uncomfortable, painful grief flares in his stomach, a messy beast that Bruce hasn’t been able to tamp down or tear out despite the three years between that moment and this. Not even rebuilding a city and taking a more active role in the Gotham’s nightlife could leave that feeling buried in the past.

The truth is he never stopped missing Jeremiah. His steady, comfortable friend that had demanded nothing from him, who was always surprised to see Bruce, no matter how many times Bruce told him to expect him back the following day. The friend that Bruce had thought saw something in Gotham worth saving, who wanted to lift this city out of ruin and mold it into something beautiful. He missed the man that he wasn’t sure every truly existed. He didn't know where the reclusive engineer ended and the murderous mastermind began or if they had always been one and the same. He didn’t know if Jerome's toxin had truly changed Jeremiah or if it had just let something out. That’s what ached.

You can grieve anything. You can rage and rail, but there’s no laying the dead to rest when the body’s missing and all your memories seem insubstantial and questionable at best. Scattering ashes is a lot less poetic when everything around you is on fire and you’re still telling yourself everything is fine.

Later, after Jeremiah’s show is crashed by cops and he and Ecco make their grand exit by blowing a hole in the side of the building, Bruce goes home and researches. He doesn’t pull out his father’s books, certain he won’t find anything about _this_ in them. He’s not sure what he would do if he did find it after all. The notated Kama Sutra his mother kept on her personal bookshelf was more than enough. Instead, Bruce opens the secure laptop Lucius built for him, and gets to work. He spends two hours reading one link after another, face steadily growing redder, and one hand ready to slam the lid of down at the first hint of the study door swinging opening, or Selina crawling through the window like she use to when they were kids.

It’s growing dark and his eyes are aching from staring at the screen when he finally closes the laptop. He has to resist clearing its search history the same way Alfred would: by breaking it apart and hoping no one can fix it. He slides it into his desk, breathes deeply and calmly, and makes an effort to file this little tidbit about Jeremiah away in the same place he files all his other little quirks. Of course, this isn’t like the way Jeremiah takes his coffee or the fact that Jeremiah now carries a switch blade in his boot, but he tries to stuff it in there all the same.

There’s no telling how it might come in handy one day.

-

The thing is, Bruce never actually had a plan for how he was going to use it. You can’t exactly kink shame someone into not attempting to become your mortal enemy. Honestly, the information should have been entirely useless to him, left to be swallowed up by every day concerns like Jeremiah’s latest plans for the city or the fact that he is on friendly terms with Cobblepot and Nygma or really any number of things that wasn’t _this_. His brain should not be going, _“hey, in case you forgot, Jeremiah Valeska has a daddy kink,”_ every couple of days like he has it set as his alarm clock. And yet, that's exactly what it does. 

In hindsight, it’s really no surprise at all.

It’s not the grandest of Jeremiah’s villainous overtures- that forever goes to attempting to blow up Wayne Manor and recreate the worst night of Bruce’s life- but it’s not the low effort plan Bruce wishes more criminals would go for either. There’s a church, a rigged door, a group of politicians tied to chairs ready to get a electrocuted, and Jeremiah Valeska blocking the console where Bruce can cut this whole show short. The cops are surrounding the warehouse, held at bay only by Jeremiah’s renewed cult followers and common sense. There’s not a whole lot of good going for the night, but at least Ecco isn’t around to raise as much hell as possible.

(Even before the bullet, Ecco was loyal and unwavering. Bruce doesn’t know what redirected her devotion- the gossip of criminals is rarely reliable- but he wonders and he worries. Ecco was wiling to help Jeremiah destroy a city, there’s no telling what she’d be willing to do for a woman who cared nothing for humanity and was more than ready to watch the world burn to make room for her terrifying, wannabe Audrey II children.)

“We never take the time to catch up, Bruce,” Jeremiah says, a knife in his hand as the two of them face off. His lips are cherry red, his sleeves pushed up to the elbow, jacket long gone, but vest still smartly buttoned. The church is hot despite the late winter raging outside and Bruce feels sweat beading at his temples. There’s rose petals on the ground and monitors mounted to the walls.

No matter where Jeremiah goes, he trails pieces of the man Bruce use to know. Monitors and mazes and schematics. When they’re close like this, slowly circling each other, matching step for step, Bruce can catch a whiff of his musky, old fashioned cologne, the one that Bruce use to find clinging to his own clothes from pressing close to him in the bunker. It makes the years melt away and takes him back to the day he watched Jeremiah scrub blood of his face. There’s no remedy for a broken heart, much less for the shattered dreams you have to pick up afterwards.

“You’re normally trying to stab me,” Bruce points out, which is patently untrue. Jeremiah rarely tries to stab him. Hold him at knife point, try to seduce him to the dark side, get in a few cheap shots about his dead parents and well known lack of friends? Absolutely. But actually stab him? Only on particularly bad days.

“How’s the butler, Bruce? Or your cat? She ever come back?”

Alfred is only phone call away, as he always is when Bruce went on his nightly excursions. Selina is pilfering the pockets of wealthy tourists. Bruce knows she’s chasing ghosts though, following rumors of Tabitha Galavan lookalikes and hints of old friends. She had gone for Barbara, and maybe for herself, though she claimed the money was the only reason. Selina Kyle had a heart, but far be it for her to ever admit such a thing.

“How’s Ecco?”

“Lovely, the last I heard. We get together to talk about lost loves on Tuesdays.” Jeremiah stares at him for a moment, waiting for some punchline to land. When it doesn’t, he scowls.

Bruce’s darts a glance at the monitors. The cops are advancing on the doors, Jeremiah’s followers starting to scatter. _All part of the plan,_ Bruce thinks. The hostages are in the basement, wrapped up in wires, and locked to metal chairs. He recognizes some of them from his own lamp-lit investigations and wonders what Jeremiah could possibly be planning with a bunch of corrupt politicians. Unless Cobblepot is trying to clear the playing field without getting his hands dirty, but that didn’t seem much like Cobblepot. He didn’t outsource murder when he could take care of it himself. 

What Bruce needs is an opening. Just one moment to cut the power, and then he could let the cops handle the rest. They could save the hostages and round up some of Jeremiah’s followers. Jeremiah would likely slip away, but that was a forgone conclusion. Bruce could take the chance to escape himself. Jim Gordon might suspect that Bruce hadn’t left his criminal punching days in the era of Green Zones and gang wars, but Bruce didn’t need to prove him correct.

Beneath his feet, rose petals slip like velvet across the carpet. The church is candlelit- like Ecco’s house of worship had been- but it doesn’t reek of blood. The church has cathedral ceilings and stained glass and there’s fresh flowers in vases at every corner. White lace spills across a table where the control panel sits.

The church looks decked out for a wedding. The unlucky couple will be devastated tomorrow morning, but at the moment it looks nice. _Romantic,_ Bruce thinks and his brain takes this moment to go, _Jeremiah has a daddy kink._

The idea doesn’t so much as pop into his head as slam dunk his every brain cell into the trash and then crash through his mouth like a train wreck in slow motion.

“Jeremiah,” Bruce says, voice low enough to almost be mistaken for intimate as his mouth runs away from him. “Would you mind if I called you daddy?”

Bruce’s face feels like the site for a flash fire in the wake of realizing what he just said, but it’s nothing to the flush that spreads over Jeremiah’s cheeks. His mouth parts in surprise, eyes wide, his whole body rendered still for a long, drawn out heartbeat. Bruce’s eyes are riveted to him, to the sudden droop of the knife in his hand, to the way he swallows hard. Bruce’s gaze is drawn to the bob of his Adam's apple and he can’t tear his eyes away. This isn’t the time, nor the place for a brutal, undeniable reminder that Jeremiah is attractive, but here it is.

Jeremiah opens his mouth to speak and Bruce- well he doesn’t panic. This was part of the slapdash plan. He just sees an opportunity and he takes it. That’s definitely what he does.

He punches Jeremiah as hard as he can in the face, sending him crashing to the ground like a sack of malicious, poisoned potatoes, and dives for the control panel.The trap clicks off just as the police wrench the door open, Jim’s commanding voice echoing through the open church. Bruce grabs the console and wrenches it free of it’s wires, tucking it under his arm as he turns. He dodges around Jeremiah as he attempts to pick himself up, makes a run for the hall leading into the kitchen, and resolves to forget this conversation ever happened.

There’s just one little problem with that plan: there’s no way in hell Jeremiah is going to let that happen.

**Author's Note:**

> "We get together on Tuesdays." Jeremiah talks about Bruce for 40 minutes and Ecco reconsiders staying friends with her ex-boss/mostly one-sided ex-love interest. 
> 
> Also, I don't write sex scenes often and I haven't decided if I will in this fic. We'll have to wait and see.


End file.
